Florida Makes Gitmo Look Humane

Ian Manuel, the Florida prison inmate consigned as a young
teenager to nearly 15 years in the close confines and brutal loneliness of solitary
confinement, is now in a psychiatric lock-up. Meg Laughlin, the St. Petersburg
Times reporter, remember hereabouts as a dazzling writer for Tropic Magazine,
wrote that Manuel (whose name I muffed in my Jan. 3 column) “is in a mental
health unit at Santa Rosa now and writes me a few times a month.”She described him as “a smart kid, a good
writer (except the rap-poems) and very messed up with a lot of disciplinary
reports.”

Meg wrote the 2006
story about the use of solitary confinement described Maneul’s wretched treatment
in the Florida prison system.His
treatment was so de-humanizing that the victim in his attempted murder case
tried, futilely, to convince prison officials to relent. Laughlin’s story is a brutal
and depressing read: